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A New Amiga Will Go On Sale In Late 2017 (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quote the Register:
The world's getting a new Amiga for Christmas. Yes, that Amiga -- the seminal Commodore microcomputers that brought mouse-driven GUIs plus slick and speedy graphics to the masses from 1985 to 1996... The platform died when Commodore went bankrupt, but enthusiasm for the Amiga persisted and various clones and efforts to preserve AmigaOS continue to this day. One such effort, from Apollo Accelerators, emerged last week: the company's forthcoming "Vampire V4" can work as a standalone Amiga or an accelerator for older Amigas... There's also 512MB of RAM, 40-and-44-pin FastIDE connectors, Ethernet, a pair of USB ports and MicroSD for storage [PDF]. Micro USB gets power to the board.
A school in Michigan used the same Amiga for 30 years. Whenever it broke, they actually phoned up the high school student who original set it up in 1987 and had him come over to fix it.
A school in Michigan used the same Amiga for 30 years. Whenever it broke, they actually phoned up the high school student who original set it up in 1987 and had him come over to fix it.
My 3rd computer was an Amiga back in the late 1980s. Good machine, had some really good concepts for the time, and it was great to learn programming on.
This approach is a recipe for failure.
One of the smartest people I know used to program emulators in FPGA. He programmed emulators for everything: TRS-80, TI-99/4A, Sinclair 1000, PDP-8, PDP-11, IBM zSeries, Cray, you name it. He eventually started doing contracts for major government contractors such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc., and often for $200K to $600K a pop. He was very well respected in that community, and knew how to get around most of the problems inherent in FPGA emulation.
Anyways, he was paid to do a few contracts for Amiga computers, and had the most trouble with them. Apparently, their custom, decentralized architecture introduced severe "resolution artifacts" (his words, not mine) into any emulated FPGA bus. Another huge problem was something that had to do with feedback loops introduced by eddy currents caused by some of the FPGA parallelization circuits that came about due to optimization algorithms for the silicon etching process.
At the end of the day, he was very, very close to solving all of these problems, and he went outside to walk to the local 7-11 to get a Mountain Dew to refresh his energy. He crossed the wrong basketball court, however, and some local residents started getting into a beef with him, causing a lot of trouble. Those guys were clearly up to no good. End of story, his mother was afraid he'd get into more trouble in his neighborhood (after all, Philadelphia has one of the highest homicide rates in the country), so she sent him to live with his aunt in California. He took a cab to his aunt's house when he arrived at the airport, and was inspired by a pair of dice he saw hanging from the cabbie's review mirror. He thought to himself, "Life is a gamble, why waste time solving FPGA bus problems for antiquated architectures?" and gave it up in an instant. "Smell you later, dude!" he said, and sold all of his FPGA patents the next day.
It was a wonderful machine.
Great archictecture. I wrote "Spppaaaacee Acccce" (aka Space War) and got sued by Don Bluth for using the name (had no idea about the animated dragon's lair type game.
Loved the implementation of Mech Force . We had 3 people buy amigas just to play that game on the amiga.
Then it was ruined when ported to the PC as "Titans".
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The PDF says it will probably cost more than the current models, which go for ~$300 or more. Kind of expensive when you could easily get a modern PC for about the same price. I mean, it's not an absurd price, but definitely niche stuff.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
The thing about Amiga owners is you can't get them to shut up about their Amiga. It's like the guy who doesn't have a TV, or the guy who rides a bike to work. We don't give a shit about your Amiga, dude.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The only stories we run on Amiga are about the release of a new computer. The comments then always boil down to the same thing:
a) My first computer was an Amiga
b) There's places where the original Amiga is still running
c) This company is a shell with nothing to do with the Amiga that made the Amiga great.
d) This product is too expensive and completely irrelevant.
e) This is a shameless Slashvertisement and is about the only Amiga related stories that gets run here anymore.
This post is in line with e.
When reporting this stories can you give us an idea of the cost? 512M is a highly underpowered machine these days. Unless you are talking about $100. The comodore clone about two years ago at least came with cherry keys.
Yes, now what other computer is going to get 30 years of tech support? Certainly not PC, or Mac.
For a moment I thought the story was going to be about the AmigaOne X5000, which is a little bit more up to date in terms of hardware.
Now I can finally use all those Amiga floppies I've been hording over the last two decades. And to think I was getting close to throwing them all out. Well, this just goes to show it pays to hold on to all that crap you'll never need again.
How is that different from Linux users?
So what exactly is this based on? The original Amiga was a Mot 68k, then it was ported, iirc, to the PowerPC. So has it moved to ARM now, or x86? Also, is the OS still a 16-bit one, or is it now 64-bit? I read the PDF: what instruction set does the Altera cyclone follow? I do think it's neat that they've put this all on an FPGA: hopefully, that'll help make this device somewhat competitive.
Why is that student still in high school 30 years later?
I loved my Amiga, but now it's time for me to put aside childish things...
to point to everyone that Bill McEwen is a despicable excuse for a human being
In Soviet Russia Amiga programs YOU!!!
I had an Amiga back in the day. It was great.
But a modern version is pointless. AmigaOS - even the latest version - is hopelessly outdated. And what Amiga software is out there that anyone would actually want to use? Besides games? Which can be emulated *perfectly* on a $50 Raspberry Pi?
The bowling alley here in town still uses a few Amigas to keep the score for each lane. I'm not entirely sure how it works or exactly what it does (since I don't know anything about bowling), but the machines somehow track the scores and post them on monitors over each lane.
The owner told me once that he has a whole pile of Amigas for spare parts in the back.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
after all these years.. a new commodore...
does this also mean half life 3 is coming soon?
But here's the interesting thing. In Viva Amiga they make the rather important point that 90 % of Commodore's Amiga profit came from overseas, not the US. So apparently cost wasn't hurting them in the European markets like it was the US*. If it wasn't for Commodore mismanagement, the Amiga could have subsisted on foreign sales, even if it was a flop in the US.
*Go team "race to the bottom"!
But this "new" Amiga is still an emulator. The only difference is that the simulation algorithm runs in an FPGA, not a CPU.
The Amiga was an amazing piece of machinery for it's time.
Commodore was the most amazing piece mismanagement I've ever seen. When the world was moving to 386, the motherfuckers decided to released the Amiga 600, which was based on a processor from 1979!
This is one of the most exciting devices to come out of Amiga land in a long time. What this new hardware and core is doing is bringing back to life the Classic 68k CPU, and the Amiga hardware chip-set. To give everyone an idea what they are planning (this info taken from various postings):
1) Apollo Core 68080 is not only the fastest 68000 series CPU ever, it also is the most fully featured and compatible (even fixing old 68k bugs). It includes technologies from newer CPU's such as AMMX (AMMX is the 68k version of the MMX instruction set from INTEL), 64-bit support, Super Scalar Pipelined FPU, etc... See this page for full info: http://www.apollo-core.com/ind...
2) This integrates (through compatibility) and expands on the original Amiga chip-set (OCS/ECS/AGA etc..). They are expanding the original chip-set forward with things like SAGA and PAMELA (PAULA 2.0). PAMELA basically gives you now what "AAA" (future Amiga chip set planned right before Commodore went bust) wanted to give us, like 8 channel - 8bit or 16bit samples * 6bit Volume = 22Bit AUDIO (internal calculation done in 24bit). SAGA combines the original AMIGA AGA chip-set with wanted features like 8-bit Chunky, 15-bit Chunky, 16-bit Chunky, 24-bit Chunky, 32-bit Chunky, and SAGA offers even more. The COPPER can control all these modes in real AMIGA style. SAGA output is over a modern HDMI connection (so all the original software will display on a HDMI monitor).
3) The Vampire V4 hardware is planned to eventually come out in 3 versions: Standalone (no original Amiga required), Amiga 1000/500/2000/CDTV add-on, Amiga 600 add-on, and Amiga 1200 add-on. So you can expand your old Amiga's or go with the standalone. This will bring all those systems to a level playing ground. The crazy thing is that this could allow for example an Amiga 500 to support AGA, which was in the Amiga 1200, and display this on a HDMI monitor.
So basically what they are doing is taking the Classic Amiga CPU/FPU (680x0) and custom chip-set (OCS/ECS/AGA etc..), and put it on a programmable chip (FPGA). Having it on the FPGA they can update things with new features and optimizations over time. Not only is the goal to be mostly completely compatible with the original Amiga chip-set, but to also make it better. This means old existing software will work, or developers can improve their software by using the modern feature sets that are added to the FPGA (such as AMMX for multimedia processing, or improved Audio with Pamela). They chose the FPGA they did for the price to performance (didn't want this version of the board costing too much) aspect. Of course a FPGA is slower then a ASIC, but it allows them to upgrade and improve things over time which is a big plus. The big issue with your given FPGA over time will be how much it can hold space wise as more things are added. So that would be one reason to upgrade to another FPGA over time (besides speed improvements).
In the VAMPIRE V4 they are expecting performance of around what would be a 240-300 MMz 68060. If they went with a more expensive FPGA (ARRIA 10) they would expect performance of a 500-600 MHz 68060, which running at that speed would be faster than a top speed 5GHz PC running WINUAE (emulated). So using a guessimate, you can guess the FPGA they are using (Cyclone V) would run at half the speed of a ARRIA 10, which would be like running WINUAE (Amiga emulator) on a 2.5 GHZ PC (these are all gusessimate numbers as stated). This is not bad if given another guessimate the standalone Vampire V4 costs $400 or so. So price wise this can be more affordable then other Amiga solutions (standalone or add-on expansion) given what it offers. Of course because they are producing in lower quantities prices will be higher then common off the shelf hardware. If this thing ever could sell in large quantities (which is doubtful since it caters to mostly old Amiga users), they could even put it into a ASIC (non-programmable CPU like Intel, AMD, and ARM) rathe
Actually the third platform is smartphones like Android.* Really market share more successful than the PC market. Secret of it's success was taking the "computer as appliance" to it's logical conclusion. The most successful hardware platform, wrapped in the most successful OS, with a task-centric app ecosystem.
*I see iOS as an extension of the MacOS and not a separate thing.
Have you tried a software emulator? Modern machines are easily powerful enough to emulate it accurately at full speed without glitches. For 8 bit machines like the BBC Model B there is even a full speed emulator in javasscript that runs in a webpage. This even plays the tape and disk sounds when loading! When you have several orders of magnitude more computing power you don't need hardware emulation to provide an amazingly accurate simulation.
For me it's Atari. I want my Atari computer back up and running.
Modern machines are easily powerful enough to emulate it accurately at full speed without glitches *
* For some games.
I've yet to come across an emulator that doesn't have at least some software that works on real hardware but not the emulator.
NES emulators might be there these days, but for other platforms? Hardly.
Then there is the whole issue of different framerates and emulation of interlaced displays.
Haven't seen an emulator that does that in a good way.
Sure you have that problem with emulating with FPGA too, but the simplest solution in VHDL tends to be a lot closer to the original hardware than the simplest solution in C/C++/whatever.
Try interfacing a software emulator with an external device, and you will see where the difference comes up. For example, the Vice C64 emulator is amazing, with sub-cycle accuracy. But being an emulator, it has to sit on a multi-tasking operating system beneath it, along with a pipelined CPU that doesn't have guaranteed timing for your process.
People have wanted to connect their physical Commodore 1541 disk drive to their PC, and use it with the emulator. This just doesn't work, because the IEC serial bus and the drive loader code have very specific timings, and the PC isn't a real-time system that can guarantee those windows.
An FPGA implementation doesn't have these restrictions.
Back in the early 1990s, before Eternal September, there were comp.sys.whatever.advocacy groups. However, if someone did dis the Amiga's ability to bounce a checkered ball on the screen while formatting a floppy, the admins at the USENET site you were at were mailbombed with complaints demanding that the user who posted about their platform given from on high be removed from the Internet. Of course, back then, anyone who could telnet to a NNTP server could fake news articles out, so if I didn't like someone, I posted something about "the eggplant sucks, MS-DOS and the x86 will rule the world" under the mark's name... and in 2-3 days, they would be barred from using university computer resources.
I hate the fact that computing is basically Windows, with Apple too obsessed with toys as opposed to keeping marketshare and developers, but I'm glad to see the Amiga platform irrelevant... just because of the screaming, rabid hordes.
To be fair it should be noted that you can already buy a brandnew Amiga TODAY. The thing is called "MiST". It is FPGA based, has USB support, nice classic DB9 connectors and is available in various online shops. It is build by small polish company called LOTHAREK and uses an open source AGA core. Just search for "MiST FPGA" on YouTube to see this thing in action.
I love the nostalgia, but what practical use is this system in today's growing market? How does the company imagine they will turn a profit -- I certainly hope they do, but it seems like a big financial risk.
The games can run 100% accurately at full speed and still have latency. Latency means how quickly the output of the program reacts to the input, not how fast the program runs. Emulators will typically add several frames of latency. It's not all even the emulators' fault, audio buffers, USB polling speed, frame buffers, LCD display all contribute to latency. Old hardware typically didn't have the memory for audio or video buffering so trading latency for quality wasn't even an option.
This video demonstrates the latency difference between a NES game running on retro pie and real hardware. Real hardware even running at 50Hz instead of 60Hz is so fast to react that it feels like the jump started before the button was even pushed!
If you play virtual instruments with a MIDI keyboard you can sensitize yourself to (at least audio) latency by increasing and decreasing the audio buffer size and using voices with very fast attack. Huge difference between how it feels to play with 512 and 64 samples even though it's "only" 10 milliseconds.
When is the Atari ST coming back?
But serious, congrats to the Commodore crowd, I really liked the Amiga. Never owned one but thought the concept rocked.